


typographical conventions

by moroodors



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Ba Sing Se, Bisexual Jet (Avatar), Comfort/Angst, Jet's POV, Kinda, M/M, POV Second Person, Zuko is an Awkward Turtleduck, certain things are... heavily alluded to, i wasn't sure to make this teen or mature so i just went mature
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-11
Updated: 2020-06-11
Packaged: 2021-03-03 18:42:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24660256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moroodors/pseuds/moroodors
Summary: there was something to said about the spaces between sentences.(or knowing what each other means in the words not said in late night conversations)
Relationships: Jet/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 72





	typographical conventions

**Author's Note:**

> "though nothing, nothing will keep us together, we can beat them, forever and ever. oh, we can be heroes, just for one day"  
> heroes, david bowie

There was something to be said about the spaces between sentences. 

A tentative release of breath, held behind your lips as the hot night wind rustled your hair. The same as the span of seconds between heartbeats: decision on whether or not to beat one more time. Consideration of the world around you. Hesitation, in other words. 

However, there were also the spaces in which they made themselves opaque. Call you a waterbender, with the waterfall flowing past your lips. The concrete lines and periods separating sentences would disappear and all your words would blur together, an amalgamation of recklessness and ackingly addictive familiarity that bit at your insides when you tried to lay down at night, slap yourself with embarrassment, but for some reason you could not stop, with the moonlight tickling your nose and his smile dancing up and down your spine, twirling and tapping at each space and gap between your spinal column, a forest fire of something like butterflies (but never that childish) snaking up and below every artery until it tied itself and became a part of you, just as much as your DNA. Until, paradoxically, you would become all too aware of how much your lips have been moving and you pause. A space between sentences. 

Thriving in this space, his smile falls and he watches the waves build and crash against the side of the boat.You were going to continue, after the space between the sentences, but he contains a certain commanding tone in just the way he holds himself, that anything you could have thought of disappears completely. You look into his eyes, looking away from yours, and try to find the patterns in the rings, erratic as a spark, and just as familiar. 

A quick glance at him would suggest that he was the strong type that kept to himself, yet, it was the overlooked space between the sentences that you have seen him thrive. A real personality of shyness emerged as the silence just went on a second too long, but a strength that shone when that second was waited. Humble, like he didn’t even know everything he’s done, in the quietness of his voice. Fear in him looking away, to the waves but somewhere past that. A cloudiness in his eyes that you only recognize from the scant views in a mirror. Everyone has been hurt in this war, him and you have not been spared. 

Without this space between sentences, only the artificial heat in his words would have been felt, not the soothing warmness of the residual. 

“Jet,” He begins, in time with the rocking of the boat. “I can’t meet you in Ba Sing Se.” 

A period: his sentence finished. You hear the waves hit the side of the ship and just for a moment, the tanginess of seaweed hits your nose. You feel heart beat, once and then twice and it is between the second and the third that you speak.

“Lee.” Is all you say, trailing off in a way to suggest more but ending the sentence anyway. Because there is nothing more to add. This isn’t about Freedom Fighters or better food or the Fire Nation or anything, not anymore. This is about you and him and the few inches between you two.

He can hear all the words in the same space you didn’t say them, looking directly in your eyes like you went up and hung the moon yourself. But, in the time before he speaks, he can sense the light appear around the corner like it appeared in his bones, and takes your hand and leads you to a darkened passageway to a metal ladder. You follow him up and on the roof, watching the earthbender with a torch making their patrols. 

In the silence that the moon bending the tides fill, you hear him say  _ I’ve been hurt before. In the same way you have. I have a duty to the world that doesn’t find me settling down, but on refugee ships heading to foreign countries.  _

You place a hand on his forearm to let him know that you understand. On something deeper that the spirits granted you with when you were born. The stars themselves intertwined these two same feelings together and have left the consequences for you two. Desperate for someone to understand. 

And there’s a tome’s worth of conversation that passes with you two’s locked eyes, of pasts and presents and futures, fighting and the times before and after, the distinct second before a sword makes contact with a body, loss of loved ones and hated ones and the aftermath, and how you two really don’t belong here, in the middle of a battlefield, no matter how much you two try to convince yourselves. 

His hand lays on your hip in the space after all the unsaid sentences, thumb tracing intricate circles of sword arks and clashes, foot patterns to sneak in the shadows. You both step closer at the same time, as if by some silent command. There’s a small heartbeat amount of time before you close your eyes, but Lee is already closing his, where you see the gold disappear like a beloved sunset, eyelashes that are uneven for each eye fluttering down on his pale cheeks, his scar in full view because he usually tries to hide it from you and everyone in a way like he doesn’t think anyone notices and his face looks like a bad artist colored it in with the lack of transition from harsh reds to warm whites but it’s its own kind of beautiful, shaping the definition and making the word it’s own sentence that tells of harsh realities and the colors of the flipside and the insecurities of a strong warrior and loss and growth and living and loving. 

There should be a religion, in the way his mouth feels against yours. Two halves of the same whole, fitting together. You’ve kissed boys before, and girls, but nothing has felt like this. Like his hand gripping your hip and the other tangled in your hair were made to be there. Your hand against his cheek, soft like velvet on your palm and textured on your fingertips, a sort of representation of the relationship between the calluses and scars and untouched space on your own hands, on your being. You use your other hand to bring him closer, ignoring the few heartbeats of space that occupied the inbetween. Spirits weep at the way his hips fit against yours, perfectly complimenting, blessed by Agni in the heat that scorchers your body. Enveloping you whole. 

The weather must be dry, with how quick the flames are moving. Fingertips trace the underside of your shirt, your chest, conducting lightning that breathes, crawling inside you and around your heart and in your lungs, gasping in his mouth and dispelling any thought of sentences and spaces between sentences and leaves room for only the worship you have for him and that he presses against your lips, a never ending song of crashing waves against the boat, hissing of sparks from a fire, and the meeting of the two. 

Your thumb traces his jaw, the line down from his damaged ear, flitting against the edges of his hair, to his chin. There’s something unsaid from you of  _ I want to taste this, feel it against my lips _ before you execute the plan, bringing your lips to his ear and wrapping the way he gasps out your name around you, repeating it in the back of your mind in a way you know you will never get tired of. His hands still as you continue the slow journey down his jaw, drawing a picture of his bones on the inside of your heart. There’s a moment and his hands jerk in movement like he doesn’t know what to do with them. Again, they still and then rest on your shoulders, slight pressure pushing you away. 

You stop and look at him, but you keep your arms around him and he keeps his arms around you. There’s a question asked in your quirked up eyebrow and head tilt. Lee looks in your eyes, and then you see him tracking your face, your nose, your chin, your cheeks, your forehead, how they all connect, before returning back to your eyes. 

“Is this how you convince every boy to join your ranks?’

It catches you off guard, so you laugh, but you do hear the fear he doesn’t say, that he is just another boy, another week long friendship that has turned into something else, that you are just using his affection against him to get something you want, that he isn’t special. 

You say, “Only the pretty ones.” But mean that he feels more special than anyone you’ve ever met, that their connection and understanding of each other goes somewhere deeper than spirits, that you two are in the middle of a war and have known each other for a week but you feel home in the way he wraps his arms around you, smiles at you. He seems to hear this, or at least some of it, but doesn’t seem to listen to it, in the way his arms loosen in the slightest around you. 

“Lee,” You start, and mean to continue, but stop as he takes a step away from you, arms falling uselessly at your sides like they have nothing better to do since they aren’t around him anymore. His eyes are dark, like a sky without the sun, and he doesn’t look at you. For a moment, you see his hands shake before he clenches them and holds them behind his back, past where you can see. 

He takes a deep breath and looks back at the ocean. “I can’t- We can’t-” He struggles with words and you don’t know the reasons he’s telling himself but you know the consequences of the reasons. So you end his sentence with a step forward and arms around him, bringing him close to your chest. There’s a flame in your heart that he placed there and you hope he can hear, maybe he does with the hesitant arms around you.

You can already see the walls of Ba Sing Se in the distance, sucking the breath out of you. “We only have tonight,” You mutter in his ear, something out the side of your mouth that brings the question  _ Do we use this last night _ ?

“We only have tonight,” Lee agrees, vibrating your chest with his vocal cords. 

There must be tendrils of flame beneath you, showing in your eyes, felt through your veins, as you take his hand and lead him back down the ladder and to your room. The space between you two is erased, to where it’s barely a memory. There’s an art in the way he gasps your name, in the arc of his back lifting up from the bed, in the torch light flickering over his bare skin. Ethereal in the way you wake up with him in your arms as the sun rises. A divine being of the space between sentences. 

There’s no proper goodbye. Unsaid sentences remaining unsaid.

But, when you see an old man, that you think is Lee’s uncle, blowing heat into his cold tea, you don’t say anything about it.

**Author's Note:**

> this was my first avatar writing, let me know what you think! 
> 
> thanks for reading!!!


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